Pirates vs Lasers with Translation

With more than 3 million iPads finding their way into consumer hands, the iPad has comfortably found a place for itself in the musical chairs game of consumer electronics. The way fans and consumers have reacted to the iPad defied critics who proclaimed that the device didn’t fill a need, and it is “simply an over sized iPod that could double as a colored Kindle“.

The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A number of words will no longer be autocompleted or trigger an instant search, among them the interesting and perfectly legal “bittorrent.”

Your world just got smaller thanks to Jibbigo, a speech-to-speech translation app for your mobile device.
You talk in one language, it talks back in the other. Simple as that.
No data charges required–just your voice.
Available on iTunes and in the Android Marketplace for: Spanish-English, Japanese-English, Chinese-English, Iraqi Arabic-English, Korean-English, French-English. German-English, and Philipino-English.

“We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time,” Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, told Times Online. “Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”

You normally wouldn’t associate a speaker and microphone with your mouse, but the folks over at eGANG Corporation obviously thought that it was a good idea as the company released its W3 IGM-7000 Audio Mouse that features a built-in stereo speaker and microphone. This mouse offers 1000dpi tracking, a 2-channel stereo speaker and microphone that can be used for listening to music and making VoIP calls. If your computer is short of USB ports, this might be a useful alternative to a USB hub as it only uses a single USB socket. The mouse itself is ergonomically designed and features browsing control and volume control buttons.

Betelgeuse, one of the night sky’s brightest stars, is losing mass (it is collapsing). It could run out of fuel and go super-nova at any time.
When that happens, for at least a few weeks, we would see a second sun in teh sky. There may also be no night.
A neutron star may result in the formation of a black hole 1300 light years from Earth. Of course – it’s all harmless…

Some think its fantasy, but high-seas bandits are a big problem for ships; including oil tankers and container ships. Last year, there were 430 reported attacks acoording to the ICC’s International Maritime Bureau. BAE Systems has come up with a prototype device that shoots a nonlethal laser beam that can be seen over 1.2 miles away. The laser provides a visual warning to not come any closer. Attackers who ignore the warning will be subjected to the disorienting effects of the light.

Earlier this week the Egyptian government started blocking social sites like facebook, twitter, etc. Late Thursday, they dropped internet connection to most ISPs including their four largest. One ISP is still up that handles the stock excahnge and some big multi-national compaies (like Exxon, Coke, and Nestle). About 88% of egyptian internet has fallen off the web including banks, schools, cafes, government agencies, etc.

For the fourth consecutive year, Google is funding CS4HS. It is a workshop for high school and middle school computer science teachers that introduces new and emerging concepts in computing, and provides tips, tools and guidance on how to teach them.

If you’re interested in hosting a workshop at your university, community college, or technical School (in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Middle East or Africa), you can submit an application for grant funding at www.cs4hs.com. Applications are due before February 18.

Alex Jordan, a former Ph.D. student in Stanford’s psychology department took interest in the way his friends reacted after cruising Facebook. He explains that without fail, his friends “were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life.”
Philosopher Montesquieu: “If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.”